How I Created a Fictional Psychopath

By Elisabeth Eaves

Novelists are always trying to get into the minds of our characters. Sometimes, we draw from personal experience, like method actors. Often, though, we have to inhabit a state of mind we've never experienced. This requires imagination, of course, but when writing about a character with a developmental disorder, we also have other tools at our disposal. Most of these disorders have been studied for decades and are described in libraries' worth of scientific reports. I turned to these and other factual sources when I wanted to understand Cate Winter, the psychopathic character at the center of my novel, The Outlier.

I've been as entertained by criminals with psychopathy in books and on-screen as much as anyone else. Who can forget Marlo Stanfield, the ruthless drug dealer in The Wire? Or the assassin Villanelle in Killing Eve, whose only emotion is glee at her own handiwork? But it wasn't until I read up on the science that I became interested in writing a psychopathic character, and one who came closer to reality. In a lot of fiction about psychopathy, the "cause" of the condition is trauma. But experts' current understanding appears to be more complicated: Psychopathy can be genetically influenced. And it's a developmental condition, emerging in the earlier years of a child's life—like autism spectrum disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity, or Tourette's syndrome.

Having a genetic predisposition doesn't mean that one's life path is dictated from the beginning. Specific circumstances might send a psychopathic young person off in one direction or another, perhaps towards a stable personal life and successful career, or perhaps towards wrongdoing. Plus, I believe psychopaths have free will like anyone else. The more research I did, the more fascinated I became with this interplay between nature, nurture, and self-determination.

Two real-world stories in particular inspired me to create Cate.

One was The Psychopath Inside by the late James Fallon, a neuroscientist and psychiatry professor at the University of California, Irvine. He was surprised to discover that a PET scan image of his own brain looked just like those of murderers and rapists, showing low activity in parts of the brain associated with empathy and self-control. Subsequent tests showed that he had gene variants associated with aggression.

Fallon realized that he himself had a psychopathic predisposition and began to explore his own history, eventually coming to characterize himself as a pro-social psychopath. In the book, he reflects on his impulsiveness, manipulativeness, and lack of inhibition, and discovers seven alleged murderers in his family tree, among them Lizzie Borden.

My character, Cate, isn't the cartoonish killer of a million pop-culture depictions, but a successful scientist and entrepreneur who stays on the right side of the law. She's even invented a cure for Alzheimer's. But she grapples with her psychopathic traits, like a lack of empathy and a robust appetite for risk.

The other real-world phenomenon that sparked my interest, which I first discovered in a journalistic account by Barbara Bradley Hagerty in The Atlantic, was that there's a whole community of scientists and psychologists devoted to diagnosing "callous and unemotional" kids – clinicians' term for proto-psychopaths. The goal is to direct their energies towards that stable life -- and keep them out of jail. There are institutions devoted to this effort, like the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin.

In The Outlier, Cate grew up in The Cleckley Institute, a facility for treating psychopathic children. It's wholly made-up, more like a psych ward crossed with a boarding school than any real institution. This is, after all, still fiction. The place is overseen by Dr. M, who is compassionate towards his charges but also sees them all as study subjects. (Easter egg: I named the institute after the real-life psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley, who pioneered the study of psychopathy in the 1930s and 1940s and authored the famous book The Mask of Sanity.)

Cate was raised and educated at Cleckley from the age of 6 and taught to channel her psychopathic tendencies towards professional success, eventually becoming the chief scientist of a biotech firm. Her obsessive way of ignoring her personal life helps her succeed in the laboratory. Her boldness helps her run her company. And her low empathy allows her to experiment on animals without compunction.

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Beyond these accounts, I turned to the clinical literature, which includes the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the exhaustive and sometimes controversial psychiatrist's handbook, where a cluster of traits similar to psychopathy is called anti-social personality disorder. I also delved into the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, developed to assess prisoners, which assigns a score of zero, one, or two to each of 20 traits.

But you can't build a character based entirely on a medical inventory. People with psychopathy are as different from one another as neurotypical folks. And psychopathy is a spectrum disorder – someone might have more or less of any given checklist trait. Or they might have some but not others.

Who is Cate?

I didn't want her to notch a full 40 out of 40 on the Hare Checklist. Clinically speaking, anyone who scores a 30 or above is considered to have a “diagnosis” of psychopathy. I decided Cate should hover around that cut-off point, giving her the potential to be either dangerous or not. She has emotions but feels them less deeply than other people, and tries to make up for that lack through outlets like one-night stands and extreme sports. She sometimes has violent inclinations, but as an adult, she's reined them in.

Cate has what's known as cognitive morality. That is, her sense of right and wrong doesn't come out of any deep-seated instinct. Neither her heart nor her gut tells her when a course of action is simply wrong. But her brain does. She's learned the behavior that impresses people and makes her life go smoothly. For the most part, she's able to behave ethically, even though there's not much feeling behind it.

Through Cate, I was able to play with an interesting dilemma. Novels shouldn't give didactic answers to complex problems, but rather, expand the way we think about them. How should we judge someone like Cate, who's done great good–thanks to her ruthlessness and obsession? And how empathetic can we be towards people who aren't?

The scientific understanding of how the brain works has advanced dramatically since the mid-20th century, spawning all kinds of unruly conversations about what makes us who we are. We'll be trying to find answers for decades to come. In the meantime, open scientific and philosophical questions make an ideal backdrop for a complex character and a rousing springboard for a fiction writer's imagination.

At their best, novels are empathy-building machines, taking us into the way others think. Writing a three-dimensional psychopathic character, with all her strengths and struggles, made it impossible to caricature her as a monster. With any luck, readers will come away with a more complicated, empathetic, and even relatable understanding of what it means to have psychopathy.

Elisabeth Eaves is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Forbes, and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. She is the author of the book The Outlier..